Really Effective Single Property Website Solutions
I’ve been cruising some blogs and articles lately (mostly articles) by experienced property commentators writing about single property websites and I must say that I found some of them to contain quite interesting material and they were certainly well written.
However, I did find most of them to be lacking in detail and proper research and the suggestions made therein to be either impractical in real terms, unnecessarily costly or just falling short of offering worthwhile solutions and relevant alternatives.
Let me give you some examples:
I came across a couple of articles by James Kimmins who writes for realestate.about.com. To be fair, James writes quite eloquently and does make some interesting and relevant points and has an engaging writing style that I enjoyed reading, but I did find the articles were somewhat lacking in real practical detail or fully researched facts. I’m not ‘having a go’ at James because he clearly seems intent on providing good information and tips that realty professionals can put to solid use.
The problem is that without including more comprehensive detail or pointing to a resource that provides that detail the reader ends up wondering how to fill in the information gaps, or even worse goes charging off into cyberspace wasting time, effort and money on solutions that do little more than provide a “hard school” education to the aspiring Web2.0 realty marketer!
Here’s the link to the article in mention, and I’ll tell you why I find it lacking,..(especially considering the links pointing to it are entitled “The Ultimate Internet Listing Strategy”)
http://realestate.about.com/od/bloggingforrealestate/a/website_or_blog.htm
In the article James states the following,..
“Though you don’t have as much flexibility as with a static web page, they will generally meet your needs. The one drawback here is that each blog will need to have the pages copied into it, and the duplicate content won’t help you with the search engines.”
… and I’m thinking “what the?”,.. “not as much flexibility” James,.. are you kidding me?,.. there’s virtually no limit to what can be achieved with WordPress pages if you have the right theme and plugins and/or java scripts to go with them. So, unfortunately those comments are somewhat unwittingly flawed.
Secondly, “duplicate content”?? what duplicate content and where? A properly set up WordPress blog or CMS site will have different information on every page. Even if there are multiple (hundreds and even thousands) that all use the same template for different property listings,.. then each page is differentiated by the respective unique content.
The search engines don’t read CSS and couldn’t care less about design,.. they search content which usually shows up as html or xml language. My point is that those two inaccurate comments could deter prospective use of WordPress by agents for single or multiple property listings,..and more would be the pity because in fact a WordPress “property blog” (which is how the search engines largely see them) will beat the pants off a standard html conventional website every day of the week and twice on Sundays! I do realize it was your intention to speak favorably of the WordPress alternative, but those two comments certainly didn’t help.
The other point mentioned about the use of property address specific domain names such as www.123mainstreet.com and/or linking that to your own static pages seems somewhat confusing and I think it misses the point,.. but I’ll save that for my next post I think because it merits clarification.
Sorry if it seems as though I’m picking on you James but here’s another article of yours that again is interesting, is well written and makes some solid overall points but it sadly lacks any real practical solutions even though article does aim at being useful.
http://realestate.about.com/od/bloggingforrealestate/a/sgl_prop_blog.htm
This article also provides some interesting reading and it’s clearly a sincere effort to be of service, but again I find it’s largely just topical commentary that largely misses the point and the real practical options available.
There are several other blog posts that miss the point and just talk in general terms offering scattered views and inconclusive pointers but I won’t pick on them as they’re almost 2 years old and the market and Web2.0 Internet has changed drastically since then.
A couple of my previous posts give the indications of the real benefits and practical low cost methods of using WordPress as a single property website platform,..and of course I’m unashamedly referring to our very own IS-selling.com Individual Sites using WordPress. You can also read for yourself in our ‘About’, ‘Resources’ and other pages (shortly we’ll have more videos too) about how and why IS-selling.com WordPress sites just rock the competition and can save you countless frustrating hours trying to put something practical and presentable together yourself.
Watch out for my next post on this topic. You can subscribe to RSS here or follow me on Twitter.
Tags: individual property site, individual property websites, listing web site, property site, property web site, property-specific websites, single property website, single property websites, virtual flyers, web2.0 realty marketing
